I threw the bag down on the cobbles beside her. It broke open, and coins scattered like dreams over her dirty skirts. She gasped and pulled back, as if the coins might turn to serpents . . . but when they did not, she looked up again, still openmouthed. Tears glittered in her widened eyes.

“Not for him,” I said. “He deserves his fate for what he’s done. Take your children and flee.”

She shook her head, but I knew, as she clawed the coins back into the bag and tied it shut, that she would do as I said. Her husband was dying. She might linger long enough to see him gone, but I’d read her diary; there was no love between them, and his death would free her.

Widows had more power than wives.

As far as the other villains, Tybalt Capulet still swaggered, cock o’ the walk, through the streets, ever more arrogant and overweening, and I badly itched to take him down, this time hard enough to leave scars, if not a corpse. My sister, Veronica’s, wedding drew near, a happy event that meant we would be shut of her forever, and I’d rarely have to spy her cruel, smiling face again. I wanted to avenge Tomasso’s death upon her, but her blood, if not her sex, protected her from my rage.

Fortunate for her.

As for Romeo, he was hopelessly entangled in family politics. I doubted he even bothered to learn whom it was they intended for him to wed. It would hardly matter what he thought about it, and so he plunged himself headlong into his empty worship of Rosaline, a girl he’d never so much as met, an impossible match that was a safe indulgence of his lovesick notions.

We were each gone mad, in our ways.

I continued to steal, relentlessly. I came near to getting caught several nights, as the prince’s men had become furious at my success and doubled their patrols; my likely targets also made it more difficult for me, and on two occasions I had been trapped in the house, hiding, until the stir had died and I’d been able to creep away with my ill-gotten goods. And a curious lot of things they were: the treasured riding whip from Lord Ordelaffi, with which he’d often lashed his son; the hoarded savings of two of the Ordelaffi men who’d pulled on the rope; the jeweled ring of the bishop himself, who had written a sermon praising the moral outrage of the people of Verona over the sinful perversions of sodomites, adulterers, and witches.

He’d delivered it at Mercutio’s wedding. A very pointed commentary indeed.

In my own small way, I continued to exact vengeance, though I knew the sin really flowered from the root of my own house.